WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist, writer, public speaker and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE.

HALF MOON With Mike Oeming: First Notes

Published March 21, 2011 by Warren Ellis

You all know Michael Avon Oeming, right?

POWERS, MICE TEMPLAR, staff creator at Valve Software, and a vast number of other things (including one of my favourite graphic novellas, PARLIAMENT OF JUSTICE.

Course you do. Everyone knows Mike Avon Oeming. He’s one of the best pure comics artists working today, and an excellent and underrated writer. Look at this.

Sometimes, a new project starts as simply as this:

An email out of the blue. And then a flurry of responses – because I’m not stupid, I wanted to get moving before he sobered up or the drugs wore off or whatever the hell had happened to him to make him email me.

These sketches are all from the earliest part of the discussion, before I’d said

Which led to another round of sketches and notes, and cutting some stuff and rethinking some stuff, which led to the concept firming up a bit, which led to what we’re currently calling HALF MOON.

We’re working in realtime on this one. We agreed on the general concepts just a couple of hours ago, and will spend the next few days in development on it, to see what we’ve actually got. So I thought, and Mike agreed, it might be interesting to open the process out and let you see a bit of the sausage-making. As it were.

So what you’re seeing here is the stuff that led to the stuff we’re actually doing. The piece on the left, for instance: I was particularly interested in the heavy helmet collar, so that’s what we’re taking from that image.

(When we started, Mike shot me a lot of stuff from his sketchbook, just to see if anything sparked. And, as noted above, there were a LOT of spacegirls. So I’m happy to write something that he clearly sub-consciously really wants to draw!)

There will be more notes here as the project develops. And at some point we’ll even tell you where to find it. At some point.